The Tropics (part III)

One can
believe such a thing when one tries to recover the trace of the old inhabitants
of the dead island. Outside the art of the Polynesians nothing reminds one more
of the spirit of archaic Oceanica than the hieratical forms found among the
Aymaras of the Peruvian Andes. There, as in the Egypt of the Middle Empire, the
architectonic formula seemed arrested. In exchange for the lands distributed to
the Incas, their bureaucratic socialism doubtless exacted from them that blind
and definitive submission of soul to everything touching the spiritual domain.
The Aymaras had reached the point of no longer seeking anything more in nature
than motives for ideographs, which they stylized with relentless insistence.
Hieroglyphics, carved out and flat, and composite images in which vague human
forms appeared among the precise and mysterious interlacings of geometrical
figures, framed the monolithic gates of the temples and the palaces. Pizarro
melted down and minted the silver and golden statues which the Incas erected to
their heroes. Were they of a freer art? Doubtless they were. . . The Quichua
pottery of the same time bears witness to a charming popular spirit. These
peoples were good. They loved men and beasts. They looked on them roguishly,
but very gently. Almost all their pots, their bottles, their alcarazas for
keeping water cold, had heads of animals as spouts, and arms or paws for
handles, and the forms are unforeseen, sometimes beautiful; almost always
monstrous, they are grotesque, contorted, blown up, crushed in, warped, or
paunchlike. Egypt had also reserved the hieratic forms for the face of the
sanctuaries, and spent her sorrow in the shadows where, like Peru, she buried
her mummies. She also loved to give animal forms to her smallest objects, to
finish off pitchers and jugs with the heads of cats, of panthers, of jackals,
and cynocephali, even as the Peruvians drew out the tops of their vessels or
flattened them down into the heads of dogs, of pumas, of ducks, and alligators.
But in Egypt there was a purer and a loftier spirit. And if she was sometimes
moved by her bent for irony, a very discreet and subtle tendency, she seldom
went so far as caricature. Instead of heaping up her cadavers in earthen vases,
she stretched them out in troughs of granite. She possessed the cult of form
even beyond the grave, and purified the form to the point of abstraction. The
wing of the mind had touched it—and our world was to issue from that contact.

But in
Peru also there was no lack either of ingenious social systems or of great
dreams. Does not an Aymar legend show the creator peopling the earth with
statues which he animates and to which he intrusts the mission of civilizing
the world? In no other cosmogony is this profound myth to be found. The old
Peruvian poets had felt that it is only when there is a contact between the
soul and form that the lightning flashes, and that it is for the artist to
introduce into the universe more order, a harmony which is forever evolving and
which projects upon the future an anticipated realization of our hope. But the
murderous climate and the debilitation of the people, who were decimated by the
bloody sacrifices which the priests offered to the sun, upset the prophecies of
those who sang the epic of the race and neutralized the best-intentioned
sociological teachings. In that torrid and trembling part of America, the most
gigantic efforts were to miscarry suddenly, upon the shock of contact with a
superior civilization. For in spite of everything, the Spanish civilization was
superior, despite the killing and rapine of its envoys and the Inquisition
which they brought with them. These adventurers, coming from an old world where
the human mind was boiling with the deepest agitation to which it had been a prey
for fifteen centuries, these violent madmen, who had stumbled against this
continent in trying to encircle the earth, represented the conquest of the
future against themselves.

They
had only to touch a finger to the rotten fruit for it to fall from the old tree
in which the sap no longer rose. In Mexico, even more than in Peru, the
incessant ritual massacres had plunged the people into a dull torpor that
rendered them incapable of resisting the effort of the invader for more than
two years. The sole remaining energy which they recovered was used to help
Cortez in driving the Aztecs from Tenochtitlan [Aztec name for the City of
Mexico], which the latter had held under their yoke for two centuries. All
things considered, the religion of Torquemada immolated fewer victims than did
that of Montezuma. And for a thousand years, moreover, such deep waves of men
had been passing over this soil that there came over its ancient possessors an
absolute indifference as to which master must be paid and to which god should
have its tithes of gold and of blood. Like the Dorians in primitive Greece,
like the Teutons in the Italy that was the contemporary of the civilizations of
Mexico, all the conquerors had come from the north—the Toltecs in the sixth
century, the Chichimecas in the ninth, the Aztecs in the thirteenth. From what
direction they had entered, whether from the Orient or the Occident, from
Greenland or the Bering Sea, we do not know—from both directions, doubtless. We
find all types among the present-day natives or in the old sculptures of
Mexico: Mongolian Asia and probably Scandinavian Europe are represented there,
perhaps also the sunken Atlantis. The people had, doubtless, crossed the polar
regions, carrying with them, in their migrations, some of those Inoits who
still inhabit the shores of the Arctic Ocean and who are said by certain
scholars to be the descendants of the oldest artist people of the earth, the
cave dwellers of Périgord who moved northward with the cold. They had come into
contact also with the nomadic Indians of North America, leaving some of their
own people among them and taking with them some of the latter to the south. At
some periods they had spent winters with the polar races, huddled in their
squalid, ill-smelling huts, and, in the dim light, had, with the natives, given
rhythm to the interminable polar night by preparing the apparatus for fishing,
hunting, and command—the reindeer horn, the jaws of the reindeer and the seal,
and whalebone which they engraved with images as precise as the memories of
their monotonous life that recommenced each year with the return of the pale
sun. At other periods, while moving down the Mississippi, they had drunk water,
kneaded bread, eaten meats and fruits from beautiful red vases with broad black
spots, which sometimes give to the geometrical ornament the crude appearance of
a beast or a bird. They had slept on the prairies under tents of hide decorated
with childlike designs of hunted bison, demons, and fearful gods, which, in
their violent coloring and their awkward drawing, united the most primitive of
symbolisms with the most primitive of writings. In them can be foreseen the
hieroglyphs of Mexican manuscripts and of Peruvian bas-reliefs, with their
geometrical life and their harsh intricacies like those of a picture puzzle.
With their faces hidden under horrible masks decorated with striped feathers,
beaks, and horns, their bodies painted in violent colors and covered from head
to heel with multicolored plumes which gave them the appearance of those monsters
with crested spines that are found in the coal of the Rocky Mountains, they had
danced the terrible war dances that center round the idea of death. [The art of
the polar regions and the art of the North American Indians, among the Eskimos,
on one hand, and among the natives of Alaska, Vancouver, and the United States,
on the other, still continues to-day nearly the same as it has always been. It
seems to present the point of relationship with Mexican art—which would be the
stylization attained after centuries or thousands of years—that the artistic
industries of the African Negroes have to the great art of Egypt.] Perhaps even
more distant memories moved within them; perhaps there lay in the depths of
their minds some images of the sculptured rocks of prehistoric Scandinavia and
through the thousands of years of their traditions they may have preserved,
transformed by time and adapted to new climates, the primeval technic of
building with wood which their oldest ancestor had brought from the plateau of
Iran. [Viollet-le-Duc, Preface to Cités et
Ruines Américaines, by Désiré
Charnay.]

In any
event, the ruins which are so abundant in Yucatan all bear the trace of these
things. The Maya conquerors, who constructed these edifices, probably before
the arrival of the Toltecs and perhaps even at the period of the Greco-Latin
civilizations, connect the American branch of the Aryas—through their pyramids
built with steps on the outside and their buildings with sloping walls—with the
Asiatic and European branches which had spread, in the earliest times of our
history, over Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, Greece, and southern Italy. And in all
the remainder of Mexico, which, in the Middle Ages, was covered with aqueducts,
quays, piers, canals, bridges, reservoirs, stone streets, pyramidal temples,
terraced palaces, and ramparts, the genius of the white peoples, more or less
mingled, more or less resistant, persists—in great purity at times, as among
the Yucatecs, or stifled, oftentimes, by theocratic formulas, as at Mitla, or
thickened by black or yellow blood, as we find it when we wander on the
plateaus where so many races are crossed, where Nature takes back everything to
herself, where the woods so often cover enormous ruins that bear on their
summit a temple of the Catholic god.

As in
India, when one moves from the south to the north, from the confused
intoxication of the sensualist peoples to the clear conceptions of the
rationalist peoples, here, when one descends from the north to the south, one
passes through every stage, from the façades bursting with complicated
sculptures to the great horizontal bands—smooth or hollowed out into abstract
ornament—which are supported by colonnades and cut by pure edges, as bare as
the profile of the soil. From the calcareous plains of Yucatan to the cool
plateaus of upper Mexico the way leads through feverish undergrowth, alive with
serpents, scorpions, and poisonous insects—a place where the mind could have
been dulled by the weight of the noxious exhalations, the eye blurred by bloody
mists, so that the various styles of building were fused, as the most bizarre
fancies of theocratic pride were imposed on the architects. Primitive India,
northern Europe, Asia, and America were mingled, even as their mythologies had
been mingled, and disfigured, in the fierce soul of the old Mexican prophets.
Nothing can express the burning restlessness of the soul of these peoples, who
knew astronomy; who had divided the epic of humanity into four sublime ages—
the suns of water, air, fire, and earth—which represent the struggle against
the deluge, the cold, lava, and hunger; who sang the loves of the volcanoes;
who adored the sun, the profound father of life, from the tops of the terraces,
but who thought it necessary that the walls of the temples which they raised to
him be always bathed in human blood, that it should rot on the burning earth,
and that at the summit of the temples a Stone of Hearts should offer to the
eagles the viscera of the human beings who were sacrificed. [I address my warmest
thanks to M. Auguste Génin of the City of Mexico for the precious information
that he has transmitted to me, when I have not found it in his beautiful Poëmes
Aztèques. M. Briquet, the photographer at the City of Mexico, is also entitled
to my deep gratitude for the zeal and disinterestedness with which he has
placed at my disposal a great number of photographic documents.]

For
Teoyaomiqui, goddess of death, for Huitzilopoctli, god of carnage, for Tlaloc,
god of water, of forests, of storms, the god who regulated the warm torrents
that streamed from the sky for six months, and for Quetzalcoatl, the plumed
serpent that was already adored by the Toltecs [Toltec signifies “artist”]—from
whom the masters of Tenochtitlan received art, the cult of the sun, and the
thirst for blood—for all these gods new cadavers were necessary. To consecrate
the temples of Huitzilopoctli at Tenochtitlan, eighty thousand prisoners had
their throats cut. The bread offered in sacrifice was kneaded with the blood of
children and virgins. Their hearts were torn out and lifted up to the god, the
pools of blood that spurted from the severed arteries were carefully spread
over the image of the god so that it should disappear under a mantle of smoking
clots at the end of the ceremonies. Heaps of severed heads were raised as high
as the pyramidal temples. There were sanctuaries where one entered through a
mouth whose teeth crushed skulls and tore entrails and which one could not pass
without walking in blood up to the knees. The priests flayed men to dress in
their skins.

From
the depths of this horrible red steam that rose everywhere, which got into
one's throat, caused a nauseous poison to roll in the veins, and threw a veil
over memory, how could the enervated and discouraged soul of the peoples have
drawn the forms that surrounded them, the great laws of living structure from
which there issued through Egypt and Greece the civilization of the Occident?
Everything that was not death was hidden from the eyes of the people. Only when
the sun was at its zenith did it touch the sculptured altar in the well that
was hidden in the heart of the artificial mountain. The flat bas-reliefs with
which the walls were covered and in which one might, under the brilliant
varnish of the greens, the turquoise blues, and the reds, have seen men in
plumed helmets hunting the tiger and the boa, disappeared under the blood. The
vapor of the slaughterhouse masked the idols. The tradition of sculptured
material could not be handed on to mutilated generations, and the landscape at
which they looked too hastily was always steaming with rain or else vibrating
with sunlight. It is by the intuition for mass, and not by intelligence in the
use of profile, that one may compare the stone idols which the bronze tools of
the Mexicans drew little by little from the block, with the pure Egyptian
colossuses whose planes answer one another, introduce one another, and balance,
as the land balances the sea.

The
Mexicans scarcely reached and certainly could not go beyond the architectural
stage in the evolution of the mind. Undoubtedly, the need for an essential
symmetry haunts them when they raise Tlaloc on an ornamented pedestal, his
hollow eyes turned to heaven, as he sits motionless with his prodigious
expression of waiting and boredom, or when they represent Chacmool gathering
the rain in his belly, or the goddess of death dressed in serpents and claws
and raising her skeleton face and her horrible, rotted hands. In an effort that
one feels to have been a painful one, they attempt the most trenchant
expression and, to be sure, they do often attain profoundly moving structural
epitomes, in a sudden equilibrium that arrests the tottering of the form and,
with the energy of despair, sets it firmly in place. The continuity of the
composite monster is then no longer, as with the Egyptian, in the progressive
and fleeting undulation of modeling that flowed like a clear water. Like a
tropical vegetation swollen with spongy bulbs, with spines and blotches and
warts, the Mexican sculpture has its own continuity, as it continues sending
forth its thick blood, from the torpid depths where the heart beats, to the fat
projections—heads and other parts of reptiles, bare skulls, human fingers, and
breastbones of birds that, at first view, seem to be caught there by chance.
And yet the work does not break down under the load it bears, for it is brought
back to organic unity by a summary but imposing architecture that enables it to
retain its sense of mass, whatever the depth of the carving, and that is seen
in its living ensemble more than in its abstract planes. Only, the frightful
destiny of the Mexicans warned them that they would not have the time to arrive
at the deepest meaning of the unity in their art, to rise into abstraction, to
reach the idea of harmony. They say what they have to say hastily, in confused
and violent visions, brief and fragmentary, a heavy nightmare of sadness and
cruelty.

Even
when they erect whole statues, when they abandon for a day their hieroglyphical
combinations of geometrical figures and animated forms, one would say, from
their manner of articulating the limbs and of giving an architectural quality
to the masses, that they never saw anything but mutilated trunks, dislocated
members, scalped heads, skinned faces with empty eye sockets, and grinning
teeth. Life exists in these works only by fits and starts, broken as it is in
their soul; it comes in brief tremors, and then is stopped short by dogma and
by fear. In confused forms the sculptors combine sections of living animals,
enormous pulpy masses swollen with turbid water and bristling with spines like
the prickly cactus. In Central America, where the earth is soaked with the
water of the hot rains, where the vegetation is heavier, the miasmas deadlier,
and the poisonous thorn bushes impossible to traverse, the dream is still more
horrible. In the sculptured rocks one distinguishes nothing but heaps of
crushed and palpitating flesh, quivering masses of entrails, faces from which
the skin has been torn—a confused pile of viscera from the sides of which blood
seems to run.

By what
aberration of art, a thing made to unite mankind, did it occupy itself so
exclusively, among these peoples, with the celebration of slaughter and
death—as it so frequently did also among the most civilized peoples? Our hearts
beat more regularly and more strongly when we follow the Assyrians into their
mountains, when they strangle lions whose iron muscles grow tense and whose
claws tear the belly of the horses. We unite as if for a prayer around the
harmonious groups on the Greek pediments which evoke the terrible myths of
Hercules, or the war of gods and man, on the centaurs and the lapiths, or the
Amazons—works full of murder, of the blows of falling axes and of the flight of
spears, where fingers clutch desperately at knives. The lines of soldiers on
the arches of triumph of the Romans, the passage of the lictors, of the
legionaries, of the somber imperator with his laurels, the plod of the
captives, and the sonorous step of the horses fill us with calm and energy. We
know on what heaps of cadavers the mosques and the alcazars are raised, with
what bloody mortar their stones are cemented, and yet we love the cool of their
shadow and their gardens. We even feel a powerful exaltation before the Indian
monsters who drink blood and devour rotten flesh. It is because the spectacle
of strength exalts our strength. It is also because we deceive ourselves as to
the meaning of our acts and because we like the forms that are necessary to the
development of our faculty of bringing about order and of comprehending, even
through the composite monsters and the mutilated fragments, as, through combat
and violence, we pursue an illusory and distant idea of harmony and of
fellowship. We fumble in the darkness and injure ourselves as we collide with
the walls. The gateway to the light is never found.

And so
we must look for it together, or at the very least we must refrain from
striking down those who are passionately seeking it in the depths of the
shadows. In Mexico, in Peru, the slaughter of the peoples was at every moment
sweeping away thoughts that were necessary to the development of other
thoughts, and so, one by one, the roots of the future were cut as fast as they
grew again. If war can at times exalt and even reveal the creative energy of a
people, systematic massacre extinguishes all energy. The arrival of the
Spaniards in the New World, which brought the most implacable of the European
races face to face with the most implacable of the exotic races, was a terrible
confrontation and one that was providential in history. Spain, to whom the
attainment of its unity had given a century of creative velocity, was, because
of the Inquisition, to perceive the need that man has for man in order to
realize himself. It was not to be long before the moral desert should reach
across Spain, as it was beginning to reach across America when that land had
made a material desert of itself by burning its cities and by throwing its
broken idols into the lake of Tenochtitlan.